Medium-bouncing director back with theater for 'The Gas Man'

Published 10:00 pm, Thursday, June 26, 2003

Paul Willis, co-founder of Printer's Devil Theatre, is about to premiere the latest of the company's gypsy stage works in a very unexpected place.

It's in a theater.

That's remarkable only because most of this fringe theater's past productions have been staged in unconventional spaces, such as rock clubs, a movie house or an airplane hangar.

Three years ago, Willis helped produce a production of Chekhov's "The Seagull" on the derelict shell of the Kalakala ferry. "There were some safety issues," Willis recalled. "The floors were rusting in places; we had to block it off with ropes to keep the audience out of harm's way." That was frowned on by the city, however, and forced the show to be relocated mid-run.

Mounting this rock opera, "The Gas Man," by longtime collaborator Herbert Bergel on the Empty Space Theatre's conventional proscenium, he admitted, "is a novelty. For once, we've got the audience all facing the same direction."

Willis speaks in a deep, mellow voice that belies his frenetic output. More telling is the bush of hair that explodes over his brow. In a brief nine-year career, he has helped start and run a respected, if shoestring, theater company in Seattle, launched a modest directing career in New York, made a documentary movie, and is in the process of completing his first feature film.

Directing "The Gas Man" (the character awaited by a pair of nervous homeowners) is a return for Willis to Printer's Devil after his and co-founder Kip Fagan's official separation from the company more than two years ago. In the hands of artistic director Stephen Hando (who is also featured in the current production), the itinerant collective continues its emphasis on producing new works and adventurous staging.

In the interval, Willis has launched into filmmaking, founding Best Ten Dollar Suit Pictures and working through the Northwest Film Forum.

"I had to not do theater for awhile," he explained.

Yet his feature film, scheduled to be completed by January's festival season, came directly out of his theater work, a production of Ibsen's "Hedda Gabler." Willis kept his lead actress, Heidi Shreck, and set the story in contemporary Wenatchee.

The experience has encouraged Willis to try to bridge the two mediums. "Words aren't the first thing I go to when I want to tell a story," he said, "and film has that."

That led to giving Bergel's rock opera an early kind of premiere, as a short film directed by Willis that was shown in rough form last May at Experience Music Project. After a workshop staging, said Willis, his intent was to produce the film quickly, with three days of rehearsal, then two days of shooting. "The idea was something quick, light and fun," he said.

Willis then had his first real lesson in the trauma of filmmaking, when, even with photography complete, it took a year to finish.

"Making a film was beyond my wildest conception of how consuming it could be," he confessed.

Returning the work to the stage, Willis said, "I've made a nightmare for myself: a stage adaptation of a film adaptation of a stage work."

"Paul is a real dynamic artist," said Michael Seiwerath, the producer of his movie and incidental member of the rotating cast of "The Gas Man." Seiwerath marveled, "He's always got his hand in many pies."

Willis, he said, is wildly ambitious and even a little bit reckless. As film producer, Seiwerath recalled being "in awe and a bit scandalized that three weeks before production for the movie, (Willis) would run to New York to direct a play."

Those shuttles between New York and Seattle have become normal for Willis.

"I want to always be associated with Printer's Devil," he said, "but the work I'm trying to do has changed."